The Driller Killer

Reno Miller is a struggling painter living in a New York apartment with his girlfriend, Carol, and a second roommate. Money is short, his dealer or manager is pressing him for work he cannot finish, and the tenants upstairs, a rock band, play at all hours and drown out any chance of concentration. As the pressure builds and his relationship with Carol frays, Reno begins to lose his grip on reality. At night he takes to the streets with a power drill and attacks homeless people, with little memory afterwards of what he has done.

The Driller Killer is a 1979 American horror film directed by Abel Ferrara, the first of the seventeen features he has directed in chronological order, ahead of Ms. 45 in 1981. He also plays Reno Miller, credited here as Jimmy Laine, with Carolyn Smith as Carol Slaughter, Pamela Bergman as Pamela Bergling, Harry Schultz as Dalton Briggs, Alan Wynroth as Al the Landlord and Maria Helhoski as The Nun. Nicholas St. John wrote the screenplay.

It runs 101 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.2 from around 9,300 votes, and on TMDB a rating of 5.2 from roughly 200 votes. A critics' rating of 5.8 from 14 reviews sits slightly above those audience scores.